141–150 of 170 posts
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My GTX980 did not support HEVC decoding in hardware, and as a result it played like crap on my system. The Nvidia cards have only supported it since the GTX 10 series. That isn't very old IMHO.
The 900 series came out nearly 8 years ago. Back then the world was worried about Ebola and Russia was annexing Crimea.
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> video codecs are the exemplary "we'll patent math and there's nothing you can do about it" scam, since that's literally all a video codec is Most software is literally all math.
The Church Turing thesis basically states that any systematic procedure can be encoded into math. Software can be encoded as math, yes, but music can be encoded as math. Life can encoded as math (which is what your DNA is). I really don't understand how the parent commenter fails to see that this makes "X is math" basically a meaningless statement because it is always trivially true and makes their position "math sho…
The numbers used to encode some information are mathematical objects and they can be transformed using mathematical functions. You can encode the image of a flower in a bit string and you can compress the image by applying a mathematical function. That does not mean that the flower is a mathematical object.
The sequence of bases of a DNA molecule from the flower records some information about the structure of that DNA molecule, but it is neither the DNA molecule nor enough information to completely clone a living cell (the various cloned animals from experiments are not identical copies, they combine features inherited from the source of the DNA with others inherited from the source of the anucleated cells used to make the clone, the nucleic DNA is the major source of information about a living cell, but not the only one; it is like the source text of a C compiler that still needs a lot of extra information in order to bootstrap it into an executable compiler).
When patent claims are analyzed, it is easy enough to determine if they refer to mathematical methods or to physical things, even when the language of the claims is intentionally confusing.
Originally the concept of patent was applicable only to physical devices, which could be built and demonstrated to work as claimed.
However the acceptance rules have been relaxed in time, allowing more and more abstract patent claims, until it became possible for the first time to patent software, first in USA, and then also in other countries, usually as a result of pressure either from USA or from industry lobbies.
H.265 requires getting a license from at least 2 patent pools[0], and who knows how many other patents are out there waiting to get sued over. If you want a new cross platform video codec, check out AV1.[1] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Efficiency_Video_Coding#P... [1] https://aomedia.org/av1/
I've yet to see any hardware decoder supporting AV1. And while you can decode with software, at the cost of using obscene amounts of CPU cycles for extended periods of time which not all devices are designed to sustain, forget about software encoding. Encoding is just not going to happen without a hardware accelerator.
For example the new Rockchip RK3588 (for cheap computers with ARM CPUs and for TV top boxes) has a 4k @ 60 fps hardware AV1 decoder and the new Intel ARC GPUs also have hardware AV1 decoders.
There are some new chips for smartphones that will have hardware AV1 decoders.
The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 30 Series GPUs have hardware AV1 decoders, but I have no experience with them, as the most recent NVIDIA GPU that I use is an older RTX 2060 Super.
It is not known yet for sure whether the next generation of AMD GPUs will have hardware AV1 deoders. If they would not have it, they would remain the only new GPUs without hardware AV1 decoders.
HEVC has a long and complicated history. With H.264, it was easy - one patent pool. Any questions? Contact MPEG LA. How much did it cost? About $2 or so per device, no problem. Did you spend more than (IIRC) $14 million on licensing each year? It's free past that point. As for open-source software like Firefox, Cisco actually struck a deal to pay all the royalties if you used their OpenH264 decoder (they needed H.264…
Funnily enough, the pirate seas have lots of h265 booty. Easy for that crowd, nobody cares about the patents there.
Because people prefer to destroy ecology and user experience than pay one symbolic dollar for a lifetime license
That symbolic dollar causes so much overhead though. Who tracks who has bought or not bought it? Should users/software devs/hardware makers pay? For potentially billions of users/software copies/devices across many national jurisdictions. I click the x265 video link. And now the browser/OS/hardware have to do a dance to determine if I am allowed to watch the video or not. Or because that is a big hassle, don't bother…
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My problem with AV1 is that hardware support for it is far from ubiquitous. I can load up a file I encoded with x265 on any of my devices from the last 6 years and be sure that it will play back smoothly without eating battery. The only device in my house with hardware AV1 support is the RTX 3080 in my desktop. So for the time being, I encode all my blu-ray rips with x265.
My GTX980 did not support HEVC decoding in hardware, and as a result it played like crap on my system. The Nvidia cards have only supported it since the GTX 10 series. That isn't very old IMHO.
It is perfectly reasonable for hardware this old or older to still be in use. But by virtue of being standard in pretty much all new hardware for 6-7 years now, HEVC support is far more ubiquitous in 2022 than AV1.
More importantly, I cannot feasibly bring my RTX 3080 with me on a plane. When loading up movies before I travel, I need them in a codec supported by my phone or tablet. HEVC has fit that bill for years now, and will continue to do so until AV1 support has become ubiquitous in mobile hardware and my current devices have been retired.
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I’m not sure why is this being downvoted… A patent for a drug is just chemistry, which is also just math with a specific ruleset… Patents are designed to protect work, especially work where most of the effort is in the research / discovery rather than the implementation. Implementing a video decoder is relatively easy coming up with the algorithms to encode/decode the video efficiently and effectively however is a lo…
There are essential differences between chemistry and mathematics. To discover anything in mathematics, including a new video compression algorithm, you do not need anything else, except a computer. In theory, not even the computer is needed, as you could do everything with pen and paper, but it might require years or centuries. Chemistry is an experimental science for now, until someone would find a method to solve…
Finding the methods is the discovery and there are a lot of experimental work that goes into video and audio encoding as well including perceptual measurements and actually coming with a method that can be efficiently implemented in both software and hardware.
There are plenty of patents that don’t require nearly as much experimental or hard science work as developing a new encoding method.
This isn’t even about discovering anything new in mathematics although that can happen it’s about a novel implementation which does deserve patent protection whether you like it or not.
If one can literarily get a patent for a new pressure valve with just using a pen and paper or in even a better analogy a purely computerized simulation your argument simply falls apart.
The argument about it being non obvious is also has nothing to do with software as many things in computer science (since that is the field most relevant in this rather than software development) can be very much non obvious to experts in the field too.
And that is the gist of issue here the software implementation isn’t what is actually protected by the patent that might be protected by copy right. The patent itself covers a method which as you said can be implemented even on a piece of paper if you want to do things really slowly.
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The licenses have already been paid for the hardware implementation, that doesn't explain, eg, Chrome's refusal to leverage hardware decoding (and stop burning so much power on laptops).
Chrome and Mozilla both want their competitor format AV1 to “win”. Plus, partial support is a burden - one of the patent holders might come by and ask you to prove you didn’t accidentally violate one of their patents while fastidiously only using that approved hardware. I think there’s a lot of lawyer risk there below the waterline.
H.265 requires getting a license from at least 2 patent pools[0], and who knows how many other patents are out there waiting to get sued over. If you want a new cross platform video codec, check out AV1.[1] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Efficiency_Video_Coding#P... [1] https://aomedia.org/av1/
Three patent pools, and some major companies that you need patents for aren't in any of them. Also unlike H.264, there was no limit to how much you could spend on licensing every year. And that was only the beginning of the disaster. https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=31318663&goto=item%3Fi...
Both MPEG-LA and HEVC Advance offer Max Cap per year.